PCW Memorial Observatory – Erika Rix

It’s kind of cool that I should be near the vicinity of the landing site of Apollo 11 & Surveyor 5, as well as the crash sites of Rangers 6 & 8. These areas are located just southeast of the domes. After all, my target tonight is for a better view of the Apollo 17 landing site. So speaking of which, let’s head northeast towards Vitruvius.

If you’ve got the Modern Moon, page 76-77 has a good write up by Chuck Wood concerning the Apollo landing site. He goes on to explain that one of the major justifications for the landing site chosen was to (please correct me if I’m wrong, Preston) take samples of the north and south massifs to find the origin of the rock material that forms them. There were three basic principles of where the rocks came from: formed near the surface, primitive highland crust, or plutonic and brought up by basin impact. Taking a step back for a moment, this has to do with the rings in the basin of Serenitatis.

The results showed that there was a mixture of material that formed the rocks: impact melt rocks (dating back to around 3.87 billion years) and impact excavated plutonic rocks are as old as 4.3 billion years old. He goes on to say that the plutonic rocks are among the oldest known from both Earth and the moon.